The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  – You’re in hell.

  Gricey was in hell and Joan not much better off. She barely slept that night and what sleep she did get was crowded with nightmare. At one point she got out of bed and went down the passage to stand outside Gricey’s room but it was silent in there, silent as the grave, she thought, as in her mind’s eye the locked wardrobe became a great coffin stood on end, and trapped inside it an unquiet spirit in a hell of its own making, but no less a hell for that. Then she muttered the words: you have come back to haunt me, and she asked herself why, and at once discovered a whole raft of reasons, starting with Frank Stone and going all the way through to what she was planning to do at the street meeting. Thinking this she felt a distinct impulse stirring inside her, if impulse it could be called, and recognised it as an old familiar, a propensity or tendency in her which found expression in blind resistance to the bully; she didn’t know how else to describe it. She felt it now, in the middle of the night, standing there outside Gricey’s room, and was on the point of going in and telling him so but decided instead to keep it to herself because she didn’t want to get him started again. So she went back to bed and this time she slept because she wasn’t frightened of him now.

  Five miles away, across the silent sleeping city, Vera Grice was restless in the narrow bed at the top of her husband’s house in Pimlico. She’d entered what she recognised as the impatient period which occurred in the days before the first dress rehearsal when the role has been learned and the character so thoroughly assimilated that any delay is fraught with the risk of loss of vital energy. With some roles she had known uncertainty until the moment she’d stepped onto the stage and only then with joyous relief discovered she knew what to do. Sometimes it didn’t happen until the fourth or fifth or sixth performance and sometimes, occasionally, it never happened, and craft alone got her through. But now with the Duchess she was impatient to step out of the wings and into the light and find herself at home and in control and in every fibre of her being so alert it was a kind of ecstasy, yes, acting was ecstasy when the work had been done, all the blind alleys gone down, all the wild risks taken, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yes, she had it!

  That moment had come three days earlier when she played the death scene and it was torture to have to wait and hold it inside of herself and not worry at it or lose any fraction of its trembling perfection. She wouldn’t sleep properly until she’d started to play it, but actually she didn’t need to sleep, not with this energy alive in her. If only Daddy were here to see her.

  Gustl preferred to sleep in the front room downstairs when she wanted to wake up close to her work. She had made up a daybed, and liked to lie in the darkness beside a small electric fire with the smell of oil paint and turpentine in her nostrils. The street lamp on the pavement cast low light against the wall on which the leafless branches of the elm by the gate cast faint shadows, when stirred into movement by the wind. From time to time she heard a footstep pass along the mews. In the gloom stood her easel, and on it the stretchered canvas with her unfinished portrait of Joan. She was troubled about her friend. Julius had been so sure that Joan would be eager to seize the chance to strike at the fascists, in light of Gricey’s betrayal, but Gustl glimpsed complexities in the thing, and was growing less confident of Joan’s resolve. Gustl also suspected that there was serious trouble between Vera and Joan. She’d asked Vera earlier if she’d seen her mother and was surprised at the curtness of the response.

  – I don’t have time.

  – Of course, said Gustl. On the stage it will be easier.

  – I doubt it.

  Vera had come in late from a technical rehearsal and was heating up last night’s baked beans.

  – Why such, dear?

  Gustl sat down at the kitchen table.

  – Oh not now, darling, said Vera, I’m knackered.

  Gustl retired to the front room. She lay staring at the clear marble skin of the unsmiling woman on her canvas. The effect of her pallor was one of coldness and chill, a touch of ice in the shifting half-light drifting in above the shutters. She would have to talk to Julius in the morning. He was admirable. He would not be diverted from his path. He would not rest until those men and their cause were destroyed. But he expected too much of Joan. She wasn’t as strong as he was, none of them were. She would talk to him in the morning. She fell into a restless sleep and dreamed of Joan, whose wintry image gazed blindly at her from the other side of the room.

  Julius’ sleep was not restless, nor was it disturbed by dreams. This was a man who’d lost a theatre and found his soul. He’d seen his theatre destroyed and from that loss had arisen a new clarity in his thinking; a rapid reordering of his moral priorities. There was nothing he could do about his theatre so he went back to work and invested carefully in other men’s plays, and waited for the opportunity that he was sure would announce itself sooner or later. It came the day he saw the fascists shouting death and murder at Whitestone Pond, and watched as Karsh and his friends without hesitation knocked their heads together and overturned their platform. He had driven the car. It was exhilarating, not so much the danger of the thing as his certain understanding that he’d found the cause for which he’d been waiting. He would not be diverted from it now.

  Frank Stone stood at the window of the garret off Seven Dials he shared with his mother and the boy, and sometimes with the cellist Gabor Szirtes. He played an air on his violin, as he looked out over the rooftops; it was a fragment of the Liebestod. He was beyond tears. It was his own weakness that had brought him this trouble. His mother lay murmuring in her sleep in the tiny room next door, the boy beside her. Frank at last turned and laid the violin down on the table. He stretched out on the couch and linked his fingers behind his head and stared at the ceiling, where a cheap yellow lampshade hung from a frayed cord. It put him in mind of a hanging he’d witnessed as a child.

  22

  FRANK HAS BEEN given another part to add to his First Madman. He is to play a courtier called Grisolan. He speaks only in scene iv of the last act, when he’s on with the Cardinal and Count Malateste. He is to utter the immortal words: ’Twas a foul storm tonight.

  – ’Twas a FOUL storm tonight, Frank says to his reflection in the mirror in the shared dressing room in the bowels of the theatre. He tries it again, this time with the emphasis shifted from foul to tonight.

  – Want me to run your line with you? says Willy Ogilvie, who also plays Second Madman.

  His companions are aware that Frank Stone’s mood has darkened in recent days, and they suspect that Vera Grice is the reason. Frank will not speak of it. On one of his frequent nocturnal rambles he has wandered, again, into Pimlico – quite by chance? (we doubt it) and found a defaced synagogue, with nearby a bomb-damaged house under scaffolding, in a small barren park with children’s swings in it hanging from a kind of gibbet. He feels confident that a hanged man would be discovered here not by a child but by a policeman, coming upon the body early in the morning, if the man did it at midnight. It would allow a modicum of bleak comfort, he reflected, to make an end of himself on the stroke of midnight. He decides the emphasis should revert to foul.

  – ’Twas a FOUL storm tonight, he says.

  – ’Twas a foul STORM tonight? says Willy Ogilvie. ’TWAS a foul storm tonight?

  The others join in, each with his own considered interpretation of the line.

  – Oh fuck off the bloody lot of you.

  Jasper Speke, the stage manager, now appears in the doorway.

  – All right, girls, that’s enough. Frankie, they want you. Harry’s losing his voice and the boss is doing Act V.

  Frank Stone brightens. Any chance to play Antonio is welcome, and although she’s disembodied in this scene, only an offstage echo, it means working with Vera.

  When he comes up through the wings she’s sitting on a chair filing her fingernails and she doesn’t look up. Frank steps onstage where Philip Herring, playing Delio, another courtier, awaits him. Oh, a
nd look! – indistinct figures can faintly be detected in the front row centre of the gallery, high above the back stalls, and who can these shadowy ladies be? Yes, it’s us! One of our rare outings to the theatre, and we’re having a lovely time. Onstage meanwhile Sidney Temple is telling the actors they’re running scene iii. This is Antonio’s death scene. Frank knows it backwards. We’re all ears.

  – All right, Delio, let’s get started. Yond’s the Cardinal’s window.

  – Yond’s the Cardinal’s window. This fortification/Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey …

  The Gothic mood suits Frank nicely and with his first lines – I do love these ancient ruins./We never tread upon them but we set/Our foot upon some reverend history – he feels at home, at ease, on top of the thing, and they run the short scene through the echoes – Vera as the dead Duchess speaking offstage – and on into Antonio’s freshening resolve: I will not henceforth save myself by halves/Lose all, or nothing.

  When the scene ends Frank finds that, like Antonio, he has cheered himself up.

  – Good work, everybody, says Sidney Temple. Half hour break then scene iv.

  – Thank you, Miss Grice, says Frank as he passes her in the wings.

  – Come here, she says.

  His heart stops.

  – Come here!

  He stands before her.

  – You are a lecherous cunt, she says, and his heart sinks.

  – But there are worse things, she then says.

  His heart exults.

  – Although I can’t think of one at this moment. What are you doing for lunch?

  – Eating a sandwich, Miss Grice. What about you?

  – Sharing your sandwich. Let’s go to my dressing room.

  As he follows her to her dressing room he catches the eye of Willy Ogilvie who’s on his way to the stage door and off out down the pub. Willy makes a face as though to say, things looking up then, and Frank opens his eyes wide and flattens his lips, as though to say, I certainly bloody hope so.

  Vera’s dressing room is a spacious, furnished affair, a far cry from the constriction and squalor of the lower depths. She waves him towards an armchair heaped with clothing. She sits in front of her mirror. Frank sits on the edge of the armchair and pulls from the pocket of his overcoat a spam-and-onion sandwich on lard, in thick slices of grey bread, wrapped in newspaper.

  – Very appetising, says Vera, watching him in the mirror.

  – All I’ve got, says Frank.

  She swings round in her chair.

  – Those Daddy’s trousers?

  – I’m afraid so.

  – And that’s his shirt.

  – Yes.

  The sad fact of the matter is that all Frank Stone’s clothes now are items from Gricey’s wardrobe as donated by Joan. Having once tasted these pleasures he finds he can’t go back to cheap shabby fabrics and threadbare cuffs and patched elbows and the rest.

  – What am I to do with you?

  – What do you mean?

  – You’re about the best damn actor in this company and you haven’t got anything to say.

  Frank Stone cannot believe his ears.

  – Who do you want to play?

  – Antonio?

  – Don’t be stupid.

  He thinks fast. Grisolan has only three lines. Count Malateste, however—

  – Malateste.

  Poor Willy Ogilvie, but Frank has no time for sentiment now.

  – I’ll see what I can do, says Vera.

  She tosses her script at him.

  – Have a look at it, she says.

  Frank gazes at her, his face a frowning smudgy thing of hope and gratitude.

  – Give me that bloody sandwich.

  So as Frank goes through Malateste’s lines in the last two scenes, Vera devours the revolting sandwich, all the while staring at him. When he gets to the end she makes a suggestion. Frank begins to nod his head.

  – She won’t like it.

  – She’ll like it. Sidney will make her like it. OK, bugger off, learn it if you can, you’ve got ten minutes. Oh sorry, I seem to have eaten all your lunch.

  He leaves Vera’s dressing room like an Elizabethan courtier, unwilling to turn his back on the Divine One for even a second.

  Willy Ogilvie was not well pleased when the actors came together after lunch to run scenes iv and v and Sidney Temple told them that he and Frank Stone were changing places. Cunt, he whispered.

  – Nothing to do with me.

  – I had thirteen lines now I have three.

  – Sorry, Willy.

  – You owe me ten lines.

  Sidney Temple was clapping his hands.

  – Positions, everybody. You’ll be on book, will you, Willy?

  – Yes, Mr Temple.

  – Frank?

  – I think I know it, Mr Temple.

  – Oh do you? All right, Cardinal, ready?

  And they were off. In the first seconds of scene iv poor Willy Ogilvie has to speak the line he’d earlier uttered in mockery.

  – ’Twas a foul storm TONIGHT.

  The director speaks: Stress on foul, I think, Mr Ogilvie.

  RODERIGO: The Lord Ferdinand’s chamber shook like an osier.

  MALATESTE: ’Twas nothing but pure kindness in the devil/To rack his own child.

  The joke is enjoyed in the stalls, where director and assistant are sitting; also by us ladies up in the gallery. A little later Bosola stabs Antonio in the dark, in error, fatally wounding him.

  – Good. Last scene. Cardinal! shouts the director. Are you with us?

  – With you, drawls David Jekyll, and enters, with a book. Coming onstage with a book is a convention that suggests melancholy. Hamlet comes on with a book in the second scene of his own Act II. And melancholy the Cardinal should be: Bosola tells him he has come to kill him. The Cardinal panics; then Enter, above, PESCARA, MALATESTE, RODERIGO, GRISOLAN. It’s almost finished now. The Cardinal is further wounded and Bosola suffers a death bite to the throat from Duke Ferdinand, who suffers from lycanthropy and believes he’s a wolf. Then the Duke in turn is killed by the dying Bosola. So with four corpses on the stage, the four Courtiers who have watched from the gallery above now enter. It is given to Count Malateste to say the words: Oh sad disaster.

  It was about these words that Vera had made her suggestion to Frank earlier. Oh sad disaster, he says now, but he says it not tragically, no, but instead – sardonically. There is again laughter, and Elizabeth Morton-Stanley buries her head in her hands. Sidney says nothing. Then the director’s head comes up. She hears in that laughter what Sidney had been trying to explain to her earlier: the laughter is edgy, it is hollow, almost, for of course it is no sad disaster at all to lose villains like Duke Ferdinand and his brother the Cardinal. There is no ridicule here, no joyous trivialising revel in the excess of the thing; rather, the arousal of laughter does exactly what Sidney had suggested it would: it heightens the horror. Elizabeth Morton-Stanley clamps her hand on Sidney’s slender gouty knee and nods, and they watch the resolution, the arrival of Delio with Antonio’s son.

  The director is satisfied. She heaves herself up, using Sidney’s knee as a kind of fulcrum to gain purchase, and heads for the stage. Frank Stone turns towards the wings, and the Divine One is still there, leaning against a wall backstage, ankles crossed, in baggy slacks, a tight sweater and a headscarf. Her arms are folded under her breasts, and her eyes are hooded, half closed, against the smoke from the roll-up hanging from her lips. She lifts her hand and touches her index finger to the top of her thumb to make a little circle, an O.

  23

  IT WAS WITH a sadness verging on pathos that Edgar Cartridge divested himself of his uniform in his bedroom at night. For a blessed hour or sometimes two he has stood at attention, saluted, marched back and forth across the floor, lain on his bed staring at the ceiling, his right hand in a black leather glove held aloft where he can admire it. But there was a Saturday night, once, when he’d got home from the pub a
nd put on his uniform, and come clattering downstairs in it like the young Hero of the Blackshirts he knew himself to be. And oh, it was a fine thing in the midnight hour to sit with his boots up on the kitchen table, and a glass of whisky to hand, his mother and his little brother asleep upstairs, and himself not wanted at the abattoir in the morning. A fine thing.

  He’d started to sing the Horst Wessel song – and woken his mother. She came downstairs in her nightie, in her curlers.

  – Oh Edgar, you’ve been drinking. But don’t you look nice in your uniform.

  Edgar attempted to rise smartly from the table and salute his mother but somehow the chair fell down and he stumbled over it.

  – Oh you fool, you’ll wake your brother.

  It was too late. His brother Hughie Cartridge aged fifteen was already awake, and he appeared now in the kitchen door in his dressing gown and slippers. He was amused to see Edgar clearly drunk and dressed up as a fascist.

  – Where did you get the costume, Edgar?

  – You shut your mouth.

  – You go back to bed, son, said Mrs Cartridge. Your brother’s not well.

  – He’s pissed, said Hughie.

  Edgar did not have a strong head for alcohol. The whisky had done for him. He lifted his fist but Hughie laughed.

  – Sieg heil, is it, Edgar?

  – Hughie! said his mother.

  In the morning Edgar remembered only that he’d been laughed at and that he’d spilt whisky on his uniform. But what he didn’t forget was the pleasure it gave him to wear it outside his bedroom, to come clattering downstairs in it, to sit with his boots on the kitchen table like the fine young Blackshirt he knew himself to be. He was the future, was he not?

  It was one night a few weeks later that a sober Edgar Cartridge slipped out of the little terraced house on Inkerman Street, Hackney, in full blackshirt under his overcoat. He made his way to the Regent’s Canal. It was late, nobody about. A towpath ran along the canal under the gasworks, with the moonlight gleaming on its oily skin. It was there he took off his overcoat and laid it on a bench.